Image
by Tridentwatch
Summary: Harry crouches in the warm mud, wand tightly clutched, as he glimpses through mud streaked glasses rows of death eaters marching toward Lord Voldemort. Then he leaps and lets loose the killing curse.


Image Stream

Harry crouches in the warm mud, wand tightly clutched, as he glimpses through mud streaked glasses rows of death eaters marching toward Lord Voldemort's citadel. With a grim smile, he leaps into the air and cries, "Avada Kedavra!" The green light instantly fells a death eater. Then they are on him, and Harry duels.

What am I seeing in texture rich details? I see a white cloud howering far above the islands that dot the ocean. The white cloud floats across the clear blue sky, overlooking the vast expanse of the green and blue tropical oceans that reflect the light shining from the sun. On the islands itself there are numerous palm trees, luxurious in their growth, springing high into the air and flowering utop with numerous leaves and branches, soaking up the sunlight. Down the brown trunk of the tree, through the numerous tentacles of roots that seem to dig into the soil deeply, soaking up minerals and water, pumping it up the xylem and phleom to feed the rest of the organism there lies a snake digging beneath the dirt, slithering underground. It pokes its head out of the ground and feels the warmth of the sunlight onto its scaly head. It is a green snake, perfectly harmless garden snake. It slithers onto dry land under the shade of the tree, coiling around the thin trunk and takes in a deep hiss of a breath, relaxes in the shade, relaxes as a warm and slightly chilly at the same time breeze brings the taste of its prey toward its senses. Feeling blood race through the snake's veins, it slithers through the mud, through the harshness of the soil where twigs lie poking outward with abandon, it snakes its way toward a sleeping rat. The rat is fat. It has brown hair and white whiskers and sleeps at the base of the trunk of the plam tree oblivious to the danger. Then the snake inches closer, silently, sneakily, and with great cunning position's itself right ontop of the rat ready to strike. Boom it strikes, hissing into the air letting its fangs sink into the flesh of the rat. The rat opens his eyes, brown delicate watery eyes and screams in pain as it feels the bite, feels the fangs sink into his dear flesh. He screams and runs, takes off, dragging the green snake along with it through the forest. The sun is shining down and the rat drags the snake onto the sand where it shakes the snake off, loosely and tries to run away. But he stumbles and falls as the venom spreads through the mouse's veins. The mouse stumbles and falls unconscious and cautiously the snake slithers toward the mouse, griinning as he eats up the snake. Meanwhile a scuba diver, floating naked save for his goggles and his air tank takes to the deep waters, looking at the various coral reefs that propogate the shores of the island. He looks at the green and red underwater reef leaves and plants and the fishes of assortments of colours as he takes in a deep breath through his oxygen tank and simply looks, letting himself rise upward, until he hits the cool air that breezes across his wet face, through his wet black hair. He looks up at the clear sky where only a single cloud hovers above, floating endlessly in entrofying patterns of random breeze created symbols and pictures and he looks and lets himself float as the fishes in the sea swim endlessly down of him. He sees a ship approach the island. The ship is at least a hundred meters wide and made of wood and metal with no markings, no piant, just a practical pragmatic ship with white furling sails. The only decoration is a single black flag. His face morphs into one of horror and fear and he swims toward the shore with all his might, splashing at the water, letting the droplets rise and fall beside him and behind him as he propels his legs up and down in haste to reach the shore. He reaches the shore and climbs upward to his feet and runs on the sand, until the water is barely at his knees. He keeps running rips off his goggles which are pink banded and wide glassed that covers his whole eyes and probably a qaurter of his face, and he runs and runs across the hot sand toward the shady areas where huts line up across the forest, into the forest the huts become denser until they reach a valley which enclouses a hidden city of beautiful marble statues and structures, of architecture rich beyond mens wildest dreams. The sun keeps shining heat upon the land as the ship suddenly sounds a mournful horn. The loudness of the signal permeates through the forest and all the birds become still and silent, their songs forgotten in the wake of the call to battle. "Rise Rise to battle!" screams the pirate upon the ship heading the boat toward the shore, toward the peaceful folk of the valley and the island. The man wearing the oxygen tank is tan skinned, which camafloages him with the sand. As the ship shoots arrows of fire toward the forest, the man is somehow saved from being a target by the enemy archers. With hot air burning in his lungs despite the oxygen tank due to the exertion of his sprint, he somehow trips on a jutting root at the outskirts of the forest and falls, breaking his front teeth. Blood spurts but he climbs up anyways to his feet, letting the blood trickle down his chin, letting pain and anguish blind his mind. But he focuses on his family, on Lily and Harry, and he runs even further, crying out, "We are under attack!"

The people of the hut are simple folk, dressed in brown and orange robes. They are monks of magic, seeking the endless and the infinite. One of them is bald and has a roundish face with beady black eyes. He is dressed in a brown robe of wool and he carries a staff made of bone. The bone of a dinosaur. He looks at James and mutters a few words. A blue light encloses the staff, and then the blue light fires off toward the running figure. James feels his whole body energized, and the pain is suddenly gone. He can run faster, further. He runs harder toward the hut that houses his family deep at the core of the forest. Meanwhile the horns of war boom in the silence, and the call to battle has been heard as the huts clear of their people, as men and women and children run outward carrying staves to fight off the attackers.

"MOrsmorde!" cries a death eater on the ship and suddenly the clear blue sky turns dark, like the darkness of a full moon night, or a cloudy rainy early morning. Then a green snake protrudes out of a skull in a gigantic symbol aloof and watching like the hovering cloud. Except it does not change, does not deviate from its purpose: to inspire terror and fear. Screams are heard throughout the forest as mothers take their daughters and sons to safety, toward the citadel. James makes it to the citadel, where his family is housed.

The citadel is a huge monument made by merlin himself. It is made of pure gold and silver and is as large as Hogwarts. It has many corridors and secret passages and marble tiled floors jutting out of each room, gigantic rooms made for ritaul magic. This place, this hidden haven, it is a place of magic at its most potent.

James reaches Lilly and shouts to her, looks into her green eyes and tells her the truth they both knew would come ten years before when they left for hiding.

"He's found us. Voldemort's found us and he wants to kill Harry."

"Oh no," Lilly replies, tears welling in her eyes. "What are we going to do James?"

"I don't know," comes the reply.

* * *

Harry has been having some weird dreams. He has recorded them in a journal. Here they lie, waiting to be read by whoever comes along.

* * *

A riddle

There is a brown boat approximately two meters long gently bobbing on the surface of the ocean, tied to a dock by a thick double twined rope made of hemp. The wood of the dock is very dark, and the pillars that hold the dock in the water run deep in the blackness of the water. The boat is the only one on the ocean, all else is just emptiness, stretching waves endlessly to the foggy horizon. On the dock, the surface of it is rectangular wooden piles stacked by rusted nails as large as a man's fist. The dock stretches onward about twenty meters before hitting the outskirts of a gravel road, There is a car running down the gravel road. It is gray in colour and looks very ancient, archaic. It has a fat driver with a wide black mustache and a gold rimmed monocle sitting, driving along, with a briefcase on the adjacent seat. He is dressed in a black suit. His hands are pudgy and his fingernails are yellow at the tips and underneath there is a bit of dirt. He wears a silver ring on his right index finger. On the ring there is a circular emblem with the drawing of a snake, hissing, fangs protruding. The boat is empty, on the water, but there is a box of white styrofoam inside it, uncovered. There are bottles and test tubes filled with an assortment of colours, liquids with different textures, some thick and foamy, others as pure and clear as water. Overhead the sky is clouded and the clouds swirl around the boat, beggining to turn gray and black. The sun is covered by the thick mixture of clouds, and the whole dock and water and road is under a black shadow. The water waves gently with the small breeze that seems to bob the boat toward the horizon, away from the docks. Thunder rolls overhead, making cracking earth breaking noises that vibrate the dock. A bolt of lightning eye blindingly white strikes the boat and it bursts into flames. The flames roar and sparkle with ferociety. The flames are orange and red and seem to eat away the wood of the boat, but not the part that touches the water. The flames soon reach the styrofoam box and the material seems to melt, and black smoke erupts in thick plums as the styrofoam melts away. The test tubes and bottles of strange liquids fall to the surface of the boat, and break, mixing and spilling into the water. The liquid hisses and bubbles and then in a fit of rage explodes into a flame three meters tall and two meters in diameter, like a pillar. The flame of the liquid is different than the flame of the lightning. It is somehow vaster in size and in quality, the heat on human skin is almost burning and the brightness is blinding. The pillar lasts for four seconds before slowly ebbing away. The rope sparks and slowly starts to burn away, as the brown twines turn to black ash. At last the sparks die away and the rope is saved. The knot on the rope that is tied to the dock is sturdy and complicated in patterns like that of spirales. The man in the car looks toward the explosion, his eyes sparkling. His eyes are very snake like, slit shaped, and the color red. The pupils itself are black, as black as the abyss of the night sky with no twinkling stars to light up the darkness. The man pushes the pedal downward and drives away, his face etching into a smile with the grace of the movement of water. The wheels of his gray toyota car are black, stained with red liquid - blood. It leaves an imprint on the road. The road is otherwise deserted, but a tree at least twenty meters tall stands off to the side, away from the ocean and the dock and the bad man. It is a wise and old tree, aged bark still sturdy and leaves shiny green to greet the summer. But there is no sun. The tree simply watches in sadness as the dark clouds hover between her and the sun. It seems to droop and cry, just as the rain starts pouring down from the gray clouds. The rain comes in short spurts, with splattering water droplets on the gravel and on the wooden dock and on the rope and on the floating peice of wood that gently travels toward the horizon of the ocean, on its way to nowhere. The car has long gone but the stench of the gas fumes still remain, as thick and poignant as the clouds overhead. A small crack appears in the middle of the gravel road and the sound of tearing rips through the atmosphere, as an earthquake explodes from beneath the sea, sending waves of energy spiralling upward destroying the dock, the gravel road, cutting the poor tree in half. The noise is shattering, explosive and demonic. It seems to be the end of the world. The peice of wood that is slowly drifting back and forth, with no driver to pull or push it to its destination. It goes where the flow of the water goes, toward the gray fog that lines the horizon. It seems that there is a wall of grey fog on the horizon, at least ten meters high, but overhead the clouds of grey and black still dominate, swirling in sinister movements. Another bolt of lightning strikes downward from the heavens, ripping through the water with a loud crack. The bolt is a bright jagged line of purple, blue and green and it narrowly misses the drifting wood. The lightning hits the water and sparks explode outward from the point of impact, some hitting the driftwood, others harmlessly vaporizing into the ocean. The sparks that hit the driftwood do nothing to the wetness that shields the wood. But the message is heard loud, clear and with fright. The driftwood feels scared and afraid. The sky wants to kill it, the ocean helps a little, but the driftwood knows it needs to go to the horizon where safety lies, where the winds of peace and stillness blow. The man in the car drives obliviously to the struggle of the driftwood, or the shattering death of the tree, not knowing that the crack in the ground makes jagged advances toward the car at halting yet extremely fast speeds. The man looks at his reflection in the mirror, at his monocle and his briefcase and his new black suit and his strange ring. He pushes down on the pedal harder, a grin lining his face as he reveals white teeth and an otherwise innocent looking smile that disguises the cunning glint of his red eyes or the harsh laughter rings that line his face - laughte at cruelty, at injustice, at hatred. The seat of the car is very soft, and made of black leather, with a few wrinkles, and a few white hairs on the back seat, lined up in a straight line at the center. The sky turns from cloudy black to clear blue as the man drives onward to safety unknowingly, where the power of the earthquake has no hold, where lightning cannot strike. The car travels up a mountainious trail road, and zig zags to the top. The man gets out, takes out his brief case with him and slams the door shut. He looks down at his posh leather shoes, with black shoe laces perfectly tied. He takes off his ring slowly, by moving it back and forth and throws it down the cliff, where it hits a rock and bounces off a thick branch of a tree that juts out of the mountain and finally landing on the ground, in soft mud. The ring slowly sinks. The man lets out a deep breath and opens his briefcase revealing a gun. The gun's barrel has a snake etched onto it with a knife, amateurishly. The man takes the gun, and points it at the sky, pulls the trigger. Bang, the noise reverbrates and echoes. The bullet travels straight in the air to the sky. It is small and oval, and made of gold. The bullet stops, and then simply dissapears in a flash. Then a few minutes later clouds start to hover around where the bullet had dissapeared, swirling at the exact point. The clouds are at first thin and fog like, but soon turn heavy and black, perforatng with the scent of rotten bodies. The man gets into the car and starts to drive away as the black clouds swirl overhead. Soon lightning strikes and earthquakes erupt, and the man obliviously drives on, feeling triumphant for no reason he can discern, unaware of the contents of the briefcase, or of his actions.

A riddle  
There is a brown boat approximately two meters long gently bobbing on the surface of the ocean, tied to a dock by a thick double twined rope made of hemp. The wood of the dock is very dark, and the pillars that hold the dock in the water run deep in the blackness of the water. The boat is the only one on the ocean, all else is just emptiness, stretching waves endlessly to the foggy horizon. On the dock, the surface of it is rectangular wooden piles stacked by rusted nails as large as a man's fist. The dock stretches onward about twenty meters before hitting the outskirts of a gravel road, There is a car running down the gravel road. It is gray in colour and looks very ancient, archaic. It has a fat driver with a wide black mustache and a gold rimmed monocle sitting, driving along, with a briefcase on the adjacent seat. He is dressed in a black suit. His hands are pudgy and his fingernails are yellow at the tips and underneath there is a bit of dirt. He wears a silver ring on his right index finger. On the ring there is a circular emblem with the drawing of a snake, hissing, fangs protruding. The boat is empty, on the water, but there is a box of white styrofoam inside it, uncovered. There are bottles and test tubes filled with an assortment of colours, liquids with different textures, some thick and foamy, others as pure and clear as water. Overhead the sky is clouded and the clouds swirl around the boat, beggining to turn gray and black. The sun is covered by the thick mixture of clouds, and the whole dock and water and road is under a black shadow. The water waves gently with the small breeze that seems to bob the boat toward the horizon, away from the docks. Thunder rolls overhead, making cracking earth breaking noises that vibrate the dock. A bolt of lightning eye blindingly white strikes the boat and it bursts into flames. The flames roar and sparkle with ferociety. The flames are orange and red and seem to eat away the wood of the boat, but not the part that touches the water. The flames soon reach the styrofoam box and the material seems to melt, and black smoke erupts in thick plums as the styrofoam melts away. The test tubes and bottles of strange liquids fall to the surface of the boat, and break, mixing and spilling into the water. The liquid hisses and bubbles and then in a fit of rage explodes into a flame three meters tall and two meters in diameter, like a pillar. The flame of the liquid is different than the flame of the lightning. It is somehow vaster in size and in quality, the heat on human skin is almost burning and the brightness is blinding. The pillar lasts for four seconds before slowly ebbing away. The rope sparks and slowly starts to burn away, as the brown twines turn to black ash. At last the sparks die away and the rope is saved. The knot on the rope that is tied to the dock is sturdy and complicated in patterns like that of spirales. The man in the car looks toward the explosion, his eyes sparkling. His eyes are very snake like, slit shaped, and the color red. The pupils itself are black, as black as the abyss of the night sky with no twinkling stars to light up the darkness. The man pushes the pedal downward and drives away, his face etching into a smile with the grace of the movement of water. The wheels of his gray toyota car are black, stained with red liquid - blood. It leaves an imprint on the road. The road is otherwise deserted, but a tree at least twenty meters tall stands off to the side, away from the ocean and the dock and the bad man. It is a wise and old tree, aged bark still sturdy and leaves shiny green to greet the summer. But there is no sun. The tree simply watches in sadness as the dark clouds hover between her and the sun. It seems to droop and cry, just as the rain starts pouring down from the gray clouds. The rain comes in short spurts, with splattering water droplets on the gravel and on the wooden dock and on the rope and on the floating peice of wood that gently travels toward the horizon of the ocean, on its way to nowhere. The car has long gone but the stench of the gas fumes still remain, as thick and poignant as the clouds overhead. A small crack appears in the middle of the gravel road and the sound of tearing rips through the atmosphere, as an earthquake explodes from beneath the sea, sending waves of energy spiralling upward destroying the dock, the gravel road, cutting the poor tree in half. The noise is shattering, explosive and demonic. It seems to be the end of the world. The peice of wood that is slowly drifting back and forth, with no driver to pull or push it to its destination. It goes where the flow of the water goes, toward the gray fog that lines the horizon. It seems that there is a wall of grey fog on the horizon, at least ten meters high, but overhead the clouds of grey and black still dominate, swirling in sinister movements. Another bolt of lightning strikes downward from the heavens, ripping through the water with a loud crack. The bolt is a bright jagged line of purple, blue and green and it narrowly misses the drifting wood. The lightning hits the water and sparks explode outward from the point of impact, some hitting the driftwood, others harmlessly vaporizing into the ocean. The sparks that hit the driftwood do nothing to the wetness that shields the wood. But the message is heard loud, clear and with fright. The driftwood feels scared and afraid. The sky wants to kill it, the ocean helps a little, but the driftwood knows it needs to go to the horizon where safety lies, where the winds of peace and stillness blow. The man in the car drives obliviously to the struggle of the driftwood, or the shattering death of the tree, not knowing that the crack in the ground makes jagged advances toward the car at halting yet extremely fast speeds. The man looks at his reflection in the mirror, at his monocle and his briefcase and his new black suit and his strange ring. He pushes down on the pedal harder, a grin lining his face as he reveals white teeth and an otherwise innocent looking smile that disguises the cunning glint of his red eyes or the harsh laughter rings that line his face - laughte at cruelty, at injustice, at hatred. The seat of the car is very soft, and made of black leather, with a few wrinkles, and a few white hairs on the back seat, lined up in a straight line at the center. The sky turns from cloudy black to clear blue as the man drives onward to safety unknowingly, where the power of the earthquake has no hold, where lightning cannot strike. The car travels up a mountainious trail road, and zig zags to the top. The man gets out, takes out his brief case with him and slams the door shut. He looks down at his posh leather shoes, with black shoe laces perfectly tied. He takes off his ring slowly, by moving it back and forth and throws it down the cliff, where it hits a rock and bounces off a thick branch of a tree that juts out of the mountain and finally landing on the ground, in soft mud. The ring slowly sinks. The man lets out a deep breath and opens his briefcase revealing a gun. The gun's barrel has a snake etched onto it with a knife, amateurishly. The man takes the gun, and points it at the sky, pulls the trigger. Bang, the noise reverbrates and echoes. The bullet travels straight in the air to the sky. It is small and oval, and made of gold. The bullet stops, and then simply dissapears in a flash. Then a few minutes later clouds start to hover around where the bullet had dissapeared, swirling at the exact point. The clouds are at first thin and fog like, but soon turn heavy and black, perforatng with the scent of rotten bodies. The man gets into the car and starts to drive away as the black clouds swirl overhead. Soon lightning strikes and earthquakes erupt, and the man obliviously drives on, feeling triumphant for no reason he can discern, unaware of the contents of the briefcase, or of his actions.

* * *

rainforest

A tall tree stretches upward toward the blue sky, which is clear and far away, endless and empty save for the bright yellow orb radiating light and heat toward the earth, toward the blue planet with its cascading hills and valleys and peaks of the himalayas, with its vast oceans of water and earth and its wildlife, the birds singing their songs in the rain forest while the insects chirp and hunt and the spiders sit silently waiting for the prey to come to their webs. Everything is alive and in motion, the trees are sucking the energy of the bright yellow orb and sucking in the water from the soil along with nutrients, and the birds are laying their white eggs in their nests made out of entwined twigs tied together to form a hovel like shape. The brown nest sits high in the branches of a large oak tree, away from predators and safe, secure, locked in the niche of the wood. The bird is green; a parrot, sitting on the egg waiting for it to hatch. It's beak is a bright red and it opens its mouth and whistles softly slowly at first but then the tone rises and the crickets chirp all the louder to match the parrot's whistling until suddenly a loud gun shot is heard reverbating through the forest and the whole ecosystem goes silent. Even the trees go silent and there is nothing; no breeze, no sound, just a deep poignant dangerous silence and then stumbling, screaming in pain a stag thunders toward the oak tree, bleeding mightly in rivers of red through a small hole. A man follows the animal, dressed in green camaflouge khaki, holding a gun a half meter long, its barrel pointed straight at the stag. The stag's fur is brown and it is big, muscular and very healthy looking, with big brown eyes and a wide jaw. The stag looks at the hunter, pleading with its eyes, with its hind legs bowed, with its whole body and being screaming for freedom from the pain, screaming to be spared from the hunter's weapon but the hunter's blue eyes are cold and his white handlebar mustache catches the light of the sun, and his glasses gleam also in the sunglight, and the last thing the stag sees is the barrel of the gun pointed toward him. He stares deep into the hole of the hollow tube, heart beating so loudly, so fast, that it seems his whole gut, his middle portion is a heart beat. He looks, feels the fear rising through the soles of his feet, through his vascular system, the veins and the arteries pumping blood faster and faster, and then the man pulls the trigger, his pink finger pulling on the black switch that lets loose a bullet with a bang, gunpowder lighting up propelling the metal piece fast out of the barrel, into the stag's head, and then the silence comes again, right after the forest is rising in the sound of the multitude of creatures that had made their home there, that have been interconnected all their lives, that have been friendly toward each other. The man looks down at his kill, and smirks, his rose coloured lips stretching to reveal a grotesque smile under the moustache, and he lowers his gun to his waist so it runs parrallel to his legs, almost touching the tip of his black snake skin boots that have triangular markings on them - the markings of the snake - and he opens his mouth to reveal a row of yellow rotting teeth. Then he starts to laugh and the brown hat he is wearing with the bulbous button at the center of it falls off. He frowns, turns around and picks it up, places it on his head with a flourish and starts to walk away, not caring about the animal he has killed. He simply says to himself good hunting and leaves the forest, leaves to go back to civilization, back to his own kind, to his own people, to his own rain forest which is not a rain forest but a grey forest of buildings stretching to reach the sky, of cars running down populated gray roads, of pedestrians walking with handbags filled with groceries and toiletries and technologies, of shops with street signs ranging from psychic readings to massage centers to tutoring classes. He goes back to his world of noise and of pollution and smog that rises from factories embedded on the lake shore, with pipes jutting out of the factories transferring murky toxic wastes and pollutants into the water, letting the black sludge mix with the pure water of the lake, of the river, of the ocean, and thousands of factories with thousands of pipes and thousands of cars with thousands of exhaust pipes travelling, running, working. The sky scrapers are tall rectangular buildings with large glass windows and through these windows the man sees when he looks up desks and chairs and people wearing shirts and ties and suits, hurrying around with papers stacked in their hands and with their eyes glued to the tits of the hot secretary who wears a thin white blouse with two buttons opened on the top revealing a large cleavage; wearing a red skirt that reaches to the middle of her thighs, leaving the rest of her long tanned legs uncovered; showing her fitness, her beauty, her vitality and youth to the men of the office. Later that night when the other employees have gone home she is at her desk typing on a computer keyboard, staring at the screen. Her blonde hair is tied loosely in a ponytail, and her lips are bright red from the lipstick she reapplied two hours ago, and there is a coffee mug (black) on the desk along with papers, clips, pens, staplers... She stays until she is alone, save for her boss, a man with a large belly, wearing black pants and a white half sleeved shirt, having a bald head, at least six foot tall and looking average, a bit on the ugly side. She waits, slides into his office like a snake, and the man looks up grinning and gets out of his seet, stands in front of her and opens his zipper. The sound of the zipper opening raises both their heart beats and she goes down on her knees, letting it rest on the hard marble floor. She waits, looking expectantly up at the man. The man looks down into her green eyes, looking deeply at her red lips and feels a stirring in his loins. He pulls down his pants, pulls down his boxers and waits because she knows what to do. As they do their thing outside the darkness surrounds and permeates and not even the street lights fully light up the blackness of midnight city, with dirty tramps and dirty criminals roaming and prowling, prostitutes haggling and pimps dangling their canes, walking their white puppy dogs, showing off gold rings and blings and tall silver chains and gucci sunglasses. But hundreds of miles away a river gently and lazily floats toward the ocean, the waters are cold and chilling to the bone and the wind is howling through the leaves of the trees. A boat bobs down the river. There are two men rowing the boat, their oars gliding in and out of the water, splashing noises heard over the whistling wind in the trees. Between the men is a bulging sack of black garbage bags tied over and around a body, a dead body with blood seeping out of the bags and the moon glancing over at them, showering her silver light over the body bag, over the white hand that sticks out and at the black hair that seems to point out the body's beggining and the white nike shoes that point its end. The men rowing are grim, their faces hard lined, their eyes tired, their black raincoats and hoods obscuring their features save for their intelligent blue eyes; twins, because they have the same jaw, the same eyes, the same body stature. And the man that is dead, who knows. The moon is silver bright and full, so naturally a howl comes from the forest by the river and a wolf walks to the edge, its snout as black as the night, its ferocious fangs and protruding teeth as sharp as knives, as thick as swords. Its eyes are hollow pools of darkness, its body is lined with scars and it looks huge, as big as a grown man. The wolf takes a running start and then leaps over the water, and into the boat, growling at the two men who watch it, stilled and unnerved. The wolf rips through the plastic bags and starts to eat, starting at the stomach by taking a deep bite, a huge bite. Intestines protrude from its mouth and as the wolf chews hungrily the two men look at each other and decide at the same time to jump out of the boat. They leap out and the wolf looks at the two men swimming to the opposite shore and laughs and while this happens the secretary sucks cock, rolling her tongue around her boss's penis, bobbing her head on his rod, pleasuring him so that he in turn may pleasure her with a raise, letting him grab her breats, squeeze and maul her flesh, letting him rip off her skirt and fuck her in the pussy from behind, thrusting in and out of her, grabbing her ass with both hands and digging his nails into the tender flesh as she moans from pain, feeling him inside her, doing the dirty. She feels him ejaculate, hears him grunt, feels the liquid pool into her stomach and she lays there on the floor and starts to laugh as the man is finished, as the man gets up and pulls up his pants and walks out the door, telling her to lock it. She lays there for hours, wondering and thinking and then she gets up and pours herself coffee and starts to work again, thinking she would pull an all nighter.

* * *

The Snake and the Rat

Fire lined the surroundings of the great white castle, eating away at the green grass, blackening it. The sky was a purple haze of setting sun, and the wind is cold to the touch, and humid. The man is sitting in the middle of the fire circle, in front of the castle's porch. The porch is made of wood, it comes out of the door of the castle at a slant, like a ramp, and then, on the lake it rests like a boat. The castle itself floats on the lake. It is a lake palace. The castle is about 100 meters tall and has three towers that are circular coming out of the main building. The fourth tower is no more. It used to be a great tower, but now it seems half built, uncomplete, a pile of rubble. The castle is made of marble, and the blocks of marble are about a qaurter of a meter on all sides. The rubble of the uncompleted tower piles up behind the castle. It stays there, the blocks chipped away and stained, and it seems to be a monument because there is a tombstone in front of it. The tombstone is made of marble also and it is shaped like a sqaure but with a circle shaped top, half a circle. There are markings on the tombstone in greek letters. The mud in front of the tombstone is wet, from the rain that had come before, and the grass seems to be flat and dull green, not the shiny green that the fire eats at three meters away from the tombstone. The man in front of the castle seems to wear simple garb, a grey tee shirt with no company markings, a wristwatch that seems so cheap, so unstylish it could only have been the cheapest. It has a black leather strip and a digital sqaure where the time shows: 7:02 in blinking black letters on a grey flat screen. The man is wearing white shoes, and white socks, and blue jeans that are too baggy for him. His skin tone is strange -- pink, very very pink. And his eyes sparkle in the burning light of the fire and of the setting sun, a sky blue that is as sharp as a knife. The man is sitting on the boat tied to the ramp of the castle, simply sitting cross legged and looking at the fire. His face is sad, crinkled with lines of laughter and lines of anger. He is aged. His hair is pure white and he has a small beard that he has recently trimmed. Otherwise it would have been a very long beard. He gets up and stares at the water, and then at the grass after it. The water is still, as if it is solidified, but he manages to make a few ripples when he dips his white - pure white with no stain, a nike shoe - into the water. It feels thick, like jelly. The ripples come, slow circles protruding outward and then they stop, dissapear because the source of the ripples was not very energetic, was lethargic. The fire itself is a strange thing to look at, a blue and green and red blaze that moves like a snake, that hisses and whispers in the language of fire - burning crackles of the grass. It is slowly destroying the grass, slowly turning and changing it into CO2, and H2O. The poor grass does not want to be changed, it wants to stay green and fresh, photosynthesizing and enjoying the days ahead of simply making food for her animals, her insects, her loving birds. What will the fire do with her food? The fire only wants to grow and burn, destroying for its own sake rather than for the propogation of life. It is against nature, and man, the creator of fire, is against nature. The man with the pink skin looks at the fire, his eyes heavy lidded as if he is dreaming, as if he is thinking of the grass being flattened and turned into a huge shopping mall, as if he is considering destroying the marble lake palace to put a water fountain on it. The wheels in his brain are turning, and he taps his wet shoe against the wood, the heel of it going tap and making thunking noises against the brown bark of the wood. The castle behind him looms obliviously to the struggle of the grass to survive for a few more minutes, to be hard so the fire will take longer to burn her. But the castle is a magnificient building and even though man has tried to destroy, only a little bit has been broken, and that to a tower, not the main building. It has doors 3 meters tall and 4 meters in diameter, in an oblong shape. The door is made of glass. The glass reflects the dull receeding light of dusk, purple and blue and rosy red reflections swirling on the glass like a living thing. The doors have a handle, just a single handle made of entwined gold and silver ribbons, and opening the handle with a loud creak, the doors are pushed open, revealing the interior of the palace. It has a blue and red carpet in a strange pattern. First a blue carpet in a circle shape on the floor, above the polished wood that is a very light brown. Then going deeper inside, a rectangular red carpet moving forward. There is a golden chandelior filled with little glass peices hanging from the ceiling by a metal rod coloured green. The chandelior is one meter in diameter. It gives light from all the little glass domes that it holds, silver and gold and green and red light that makes the whole hallway seem to be a bit bizzare, a bit gaudy, a bit fantastical. The carpet is soft, as soft as a baby's stomach, as soft as water. But the polished floor is smooth and sturdy, and the lines that divide the peices making up the floor are hair thin, with small nails embedded deep into the floor, barely seen. Going out of the hallway there are three doors to choose from, each one with a different appearance, a different feel, a different smell and taste. A snake, long and black with yellow triangular markings hisses at the door, protruding its forked tongues, tasting the doors one by one. The door on the left is a triangular shape and made of black material, a material that absorbs the rainbowish lights in the hallway, letting it dissapear into its blackness, its abyss. There is no handle on this door but it also has only one hinge, a hinge made of iron, on the left side of the triangle. One push and the door will open. It must be a hard push because the hinge is at least 1/5 of a meter and very thick. The snake tastes the second door, and hisses with hunger at the smell of the rats and the meat and the blood that surround the door, that permeate its wood, that streams out of its pentagonal shape and its red color. The red color is brilliant and shining, but somehow tasting metallic. It is blood. The third door is very simple, just made of brown wood, with a circular handle of bronze. It is rectangular and is surrounded by a white edge of the marble wall. It seems like nothing, completely ordinary. Between the doors is a space of marble one meter. The marble is white, with a glazed gray streaking through it. The snake moves to the black triangle door, because it matches her markings and pushes it with her skull, using her whole musculature to force her way in. She succeeds in opening a tiny slit of space, a blackness, and she goes in because she is not concerned with what she can see but what she can taste, smell, and feel through vibrations. She feels some vibrations now, as soft and low so it could only be speech of men. The speech comes from far off, and the smooth floor is good for carrying the vibrations, the steady thrum of one man and the whining high note of another. The snake moves away from them, because tasting the air she senses the space of it, the vast cavern she has entered. She moves and uses her smell to guide her. The humans smell like something predatory, gigantic, warm. Their meat and blood she hungers for, thinking of its succulent taste, of its own self which is so small. It reveals an inner hunger in her - she wants to be gigantic, the strongest viper, far superior to the rest of the kin in the nest she had left. The water vipers lived under the lake, at the surface of the bottom there are three holes and it is the doorway to her nest. They come out, black snakes with yellow triangle markings and hunt fish. The fish are very lazy fat and slow because the man above feeds them. But they are also very big, and don't succumb to snake venom. It is a fight with fang, fin and body and it takes many snakes to take down a fish. The fish is usually a bright orange colour, as big as a human's arm and has a black beady button for eyes and a mouth lined with sharp incissors for cutting, tearing, ripping her own prey: the water vipers. They are two enemies, two sides of the same page. She has escaped the whole game though and now she is in darkness, using her smell to guide her. Before, in the water, she used her smell to seek spilt blood because the weaker snakes are scavengers, and the stronger are hunters with voracious appetites. The snake enters deeper into the blackness; she is submerged by it, as if someone has put a velvety cloack of black on her own black skin. But she is camafloauged, and the yellow triangles aren't a problem. She soon comes across a decline in the floor, a tunnel that leads downward, perhaps back to her home. Now she feels a yearning to go back, to go home, because here it strange, safe but strange, and she is hungry, she wants food. She follows the tunnel, feeling twinges of regret that she had not taken the blood painted door. But she had been afraid; whhat if it were her blood that would be spilt? No, the black triangle door was the one for her, not the murderous door, or the human door, but the strange one. The unique one; safest. She slides down the tunnel and comes across a sleeping rat, near a glowing green stick. The green lights up the rat's features, it's oldness prominent in his white whiskers and his brown nose, gashed with a hideous red scar that rots away unchecked. The rat's eyes are closed but twitch occasionally. The snake watches in silence, waiting for the right time to strike at the fat rat. Briefly, with her vast intelligence, she wonders how the rat became so fat. Perhaps it ate other rats? That was her hope, she would like to live here, in this warmth of the tunnel, in this space of safety, security, hidden abyss. She slid her way to the rat, opposite to the glowing stick, and slowly slowly curled over the rat. The rat had brown fur marked with scars, with places of hurt in various shape. It's claws were brown and sharp and though it was a bit large and a bit old, it still seemed very strong, very sturdy, very muscular and frightening. The snake was a bit apprehensive, but she was hungry as well, and the rat was sleeping. She struck, biting the rat on his neck, and wrapping her body quickly around his stomach where his claws were hard pressed to get her. His hind claws scratched at her leathery skin and she felt pain, and she smelt blood, both her own and the rat's, but she held on. This was a matter of life and death. She had been lucky however and had hit the jugular vein. In a few minutes the rat was no more, a dead creature not living, not breathing, not a survivor any longer. The snake had taken his place, and she settled down after eating a bit of the meat, settling down to sleep, to heal her hurts, unknowingly waiting for the next creature to arrive to take her place.

* * *

The ball of light approaching toward the giant oak tree is golden, with streaks of red sparkling through the surface of the light. It's substance is dense, so heavy it bends the air around it and it speeds toward the tree as fast as a zooming car. The oak tree is standing deeply rooted to its soil, its base, and its trunk stretches high and mighty, with both sturdiness and solidity and capacity factors synthesized in its making. The flowering of the tree comes in vast green foilages that stretch outward, giving shade to a radius of ten meters around the tree in a circular movement. The ball of light comes directly straight, directly from the vast ocean that the tree is near. The ocean is so soft, so beautiful, with its little up and down triangular waves glistening in the morning sunlight, with its endless space and volume stretching to infinity, to the horizon where a ship appears, throwing another oen of those golden balls of light toward the tree. The ball of golden light showers heat and electrical stimulation to one meter around it in a perfect globular area. One can see this area because sparks of gold and red come from it. The globe of orange light hits the tree and there is fire, streaking upward and downward from the point of inmapct, burning away at the bark and at the roots and soil, as well as at the leaves, leaving nothing but ash in its wake. As if responding to this attack the once clear blue sky with only a shining sun embedded in its velvety cloak turns dark, turns cloudy and black, and then rain pours and the globular missile coming from the ship fizzles and dies as water touches it. The steam that erupts from the globular golden missile seems to be very hot, very kinetic in its movements as it irrationally moves in all directions, not just up but stretching upward and moving like a plague toward its surroundings. The heated steam touches the water and makes more steam, and all the steam from the water, from the air, from that released by the missile rises upward to match the clouds, to thicken the cloudy haze that blocks the morning sunlight. Plumes of grey and black clouds swirl together in lazy movements, simply watchhing those far below the ground - the ship, which is pure white in its colour yet hails a black flag, a flag with a skull and crossbones image displayed proudly. The hull of the ship, although white, has three metal bars along it, to protect the hull, to keep the ship intact and to withstand the pressure of the water, of the cargo, of the anger of the crew. They are a roudy bunch, with grown black beards, holding flogs and galleons of ale, smoking from pipes. They are rowdy warriors, telling saucy jokes filled with booming laughter, songs and dancing and feeling rivetting in the atmosphere, making the whole ship seem like a bastion of freedom - freedom from seriousness, from civilization, from society. As to their weapons, the globular golden missiles of light come from their plasma cannons, located at the very topmost edge of the hull. The cannons are painted black and although the barrel of it has an opening as big as a basketball, which incidentally is the size of the globular missile, the rest of the cannon is not so compact. It is a vast machine, with a wick on one end and a stick embedded through a bucket of gunpowder located in the middle of the cannon. It looks complicated to operate and one can see two men loading up the cannon, their eyes bereft of all the playfulness, the sauciness that had rested in there before, when they were rejoicing. Now they were destroying, eradicating the life on the planet to make way for a bigger more advanced civilazation. But they all thought deep in their hearts that civilzation did not exist, individuals exist, trees exist, the water and the sky exist and they are enough as they are. There is no need to improve upon existences' work, upon gods art.

Good enough is good enough.

* * *

Thee truck was white and box like, with big black wheels rolling backward whihle the truck moved forward on the lonely asphalt road, engine noise vibrating the earth and scaring the little squirrel sitting on the left hhand side of the truck, in the farm land of endless corn fields stretching to infinity, their stalks waving with the wind, their yellow corn growing with thhe suunshine and their roots widening and deepening with the rain fall. As the truck ran down the road, its back made fumes that rose out of the exhaust pipe in great plumes, rising to form shapes in the air, globular and circular and oblongular shapes that was constantly in motion, constantly changing and rising into the blue sky. There are a few white cloads floating in the sky, their fluffy material slowly moving across the space of the sky, flowing with the warm breezes that come from India. In India, there are huts lining the sides of narrow mud roads filled with pot holes. The huts are made of sticks and straw and garbage bags, newspapers and clay and mud. There are hundreds of them, rows upon rows and they are filled with hard working people, brown skinned and brown eyed, skinny, small, undernourished, overworked, but happy in a wierd way, with smiles on their faces they walk around singing hindi songs and dancing their dances with their limbs entwinted within each other, multiplying but not dividing. They make gruel food on the fires, preparing the substance in large metal pots. The substance is like a white paste, with small black beans. It tastes like something with barely any flavour, but it is filling and nourishing, and for water they walk to the well where the well lies in the middle of a vast plain, a farm of bushes covered in red berries. Sometimes they pluck the berries but usually they leave it be so they can sell it. The well is at the center of the farm and is the hub of the wheel; They use a pulley system to pull a bucket of water from within the well, pulling on the thick brown rope, watching the squeek of the metal circular wheels frictioning against each other. The bucket of water they take with them, carrying it on their heads to their hut. The hut is very simple, on the outside it looks homemade yet functional, still standing strong even through harsh rain falls and winds that seem strong enough to carry them away. Inside, the ground is clean, cemented and there is an open bathroom for taking showers in one corner. The rest of the room is used as living quarters for sleeping, studying, and simply enjoying. The kitchen is outside in the open and the toilet is also outside. They squat on the sides of the roads, joking with each other while taking shits. They wear dirty, torn clothing. One person is sweeping his hut. He wears blue pants that are streaked with mud and white paint and a grey tee shirt also with the same stains. He smells bad, like he hasnt showered for days; smelling of sweat and mud and rotten fruit. Perhaps he has a basket of rotten fruit somewhere in his hut which is crowded with junk: a broken radio, an antenna, a few books that he cannot read being illiterate, a wooden box filled with cricket cards lined in the velvety underside of it... It is his home, his sanctuary.

* * *

The vines around her body curl but do not tigheten. She is stranded in a forest, wearing only a silk white dress, wearing nothing but her jewelled bracelet. The vines simply dont care about jewels, about money, they tighten around her, coiling like snakes to take a grab at her until she is completely tied by the vines, until her soft pink tanned skin that has a slight shade of brown is covered with green vines perforating structures where they suck up the water from their victims, nutrients from victims, which can be both people and trees. Stuck like this she moans, wondering why she came here, what purpose had it served... none. She felt hopeless despairing. Her blue eyes sparkled in the moonlight, and she raised her neck as far as she could to look at the canopy of trees over her, sheltering her from the pounding rain. A few droplets passed, hitting her face and merging with her tears. But her gaze was locked on the moon, it was a full silver thing, as bright as the sun with the blackness against it, as perceptive as the eyes of an owl and as sharp as a razor's edge. It showered light upon her body, covered with vines, and slowly the vines receeded, reluctantly, as if they wanted their prey too badly that they would even contest with the moon. One by one the vines left her body and she felt their corrosive slime over her dress, over her skin and knew she had to wash. She got up, looking around and found the patch of curled up vines and shivered in fear, goosebumps upon her skin. Then she took off running in the opposite direction, staying close to the moonlight. She heard the sounds of the water, a stream perhaps, rushing against rocks and she breathed in through her nostrils deeply, letting air fill her belly and lungs, until she could breathe in no further and then with a sigh of relaxation she exhaled and her heart beat slowed, the sweating receeded, and she felt calmer certainly. She went to the stream and cupped her hands in the water. It seemed so dark against the night, but the moon came, rising in the sky, until she felt its light upon her back, saw her reflection in the glistening black waters of the stream. She could see her blond hair loosely hanging from her back, streaked with bits of dried mud. Her white dress looked ruin, with small rips and tears where the vines had attacked her, and she saw a few scratches on her forarm when she had tried to fight off those vines. They had points, thorns, that like fangs both protruded and receeded at command, at the brain's directive, which for the vine plant was located in its roots. Her flesh was red from exertion and she was still sweating, but her eyes showed not fear but resignation and determination. She sighed finally and taking a cup of the water in her hands she splashed it against her face. The water was ice cold and seemed to waken her, seemed to drive away her exhaustion, replacing it with freshness and a will to survive, an energy in her to beat the odds. She cupped more water and drank from it. The water tasted sweet and felt cold, but also had a slight lemon flavour to it. She started to laugh, started to cry as all her stress came undone, like a knot breaking apart, getting untied. Little by little, with her laughter and alternating with her cries, smiles, glares, scowles, frustrated screams, she became empty, she became voidlike, acceptive of her place. So she dabbled a bit more in the stream, taking a half bath at the most until she looked clean, smelled fresh and like a human. She rose from her knees and started walkign deeper into the forest, in another direction, away from the streram. Her bare feet felt the soft soil cushion her footsteps, almost carry her to her destination. Her eyes tracked a white bird fly through the tree tops, wings smashing at the leaves coming in her way until the bird landed far above, on a nest of brown twigs where three eggs lay in wait. She felt hunger, grumbling of her stomach, and she looked upward and waited, watching as silent and still as a fox. The owl looked around, disregarding her soft flesh, her twinkling blue eyes and her white dress as a curiousity. She turned and started to fly, flapping away at the air until she was gone from sight, gone upward toward the moonlight, which all night creatures seemed to love.

* * *

The hut lies at the edge of a river. The river is blue, and gushes onward with phenominal force, its waves hitting the jagged rocks along the middle of the river, its waters sweeping away dirt, debris, and the occassional chocolate bar wrapper. The hut is about three meters tall, and it is built of wood. The wood is like bamboo sticks, wrapped in five places by thick strands of hemp rope. The walls of the hut - made out of the bamboo sticks - are painted blue, and white clouds embedded into the picture, to give it a psychadelic appearance. The door of the hut is no more extraordinary than a mere house door. It is a rectangular piece of wood with no locks.

Just by pushing it, the hinges - rusted and worn out - creak by, and let the door open. Inside the hut, it is homely and warm. There are lush carpets of many sizes, shapes and varieties on the floor. One particular carpet is round in shape, and where soft to walk barefeet on. The walls of the hut are also just bamboo sticks but the brown light of it gives the whole room a unique texture, as if it is a temple of worship. And yes, there is an altar. It is made of white marble, a bowl, a pottery made bowl, and inside the bowl there are flowers sticking out. There are many kinds of flowers, roses, lilies, and sunflowers, also purple and blue ones sticking out in a random but soothing pattern. Nearing it the flowers luxuriously give off their scent, their sweetness and their spice, and it fills the room with an atmosphere of something beyond the norm. The whole feeling it gives off is almost drug like. There is a stove in the corner, plugged into a large battery socket.

The stove is lit, and the red circular bars glow with heat. On the stove, a pot of tea is being cooked. A zen monk, dressed in his brown robes, stirs the tea with a wooden handle. He sits cross legged, back straight, his eyes droopy, and he looks upward at the visitor and smiles with utter relaxation and tranquility and his eyes are brown and welcoming. He gestures me to sit beside him. We sit in silence as he stirs the tea, which is on the stove that is not too hot but not too cold. Inside the pot, there is water, and there are leaves, grounded together. They are green and brown. The leaves soon diffuse their chemicals into the water, making the clear colour turn something brown and red. The steam rising from the pot is very soothing, opening the nostrils, the alveoili, the whole being. Imbibing the steam of the tea is enough to become intoxicated, to be drunk with pleasure, a pleasure not from chemicals exactly but from being, from watching, from the ordinary that metamorphises in the soul to the extraordinary. The zen monk has no facial hair and is bald, his eyes gleaming brown, his nose roundish and his cheeks a faint red indicating good health. His eyes are clear. He finishes stirring the tea and raises the wooden spoon from the pot, dripping with tea and sets it on a plate. Then, taking a deep breath through the nostrils, the monk closes his eyes for a few seconds. I also close my eyes and I dive into my skin, through the pores, into my blood and organs and into my bones until I see total clarity in my body. Then, diving into the mind, the haze of confusion, of images and words syntehsized from different sources, spliced and blended to make madness calms, and relaxes, and organizes itself automatically into compartments. Intelligence happens. I am that, intelligence. The monk winks at me and pours the pot of tea into a little cup and hands it to me. I look at the white porceilein cup, with blue flowers etched onto it in spirals looking excuisite, and I gently take a sip of the orange brown red tea. The liquid is very thin, and feels warm going down my throat. It tastes like a mixture of herbs, a sweetness and a spice and a bitterness blended together to make a good cuppa tea. I drink the tea slowly and watch the clouds overhead. There is no roof in this hut. The sky is always there, open, even in the rain time. Soon the blue sky and the sunlight streaming through receede as gray clouds swarm up ahead. The grayness of the clouds is very beautful because it shows the clouds are overflowing with water, want to share their treasure with the whole world, with the thousands of trees in the forest and the small grass growing in shepard fields and the corn mazes and the flowers in gardens. The clouds start pouring, the rain falls and the atmosphere turns humid, turns slightly cold, but not unpleasant. The air smells fresh, oceanic, with salt from the sea and scents from around the world coming with the wind. We finish the tea and walk outside, onto the fresh damp grass as the rain keeps falling, not gently but not hard. We walk and there is no road in this wilderness. Forests surround us, fields before us, mountains behind us with snow capped peaks stretching toward the sky and as we walk bare feet there is a sound of a flock of birds flying from the mountains to the tall oak forests where they land in their nests, and dry their brown feathers. The birds are fat, and innocent, feeding nicely and safely in their paradise on insects, on worms scuttling through the grass and on termites eating at the barks of trees and on mice running through fields into their holes and into the forests finding hinding places. The mice are particularly quick and agile, their movements so liquid, so natural to them to evade predators, to find food, to dig burrows to house their children. Nature in a full circle. There is a fish swimming downstream. It is a fat fish, well fed, and orange and blue coloured with beady gray eyes, simply swimming gently in zig zag motions. The monk reaches down and grabs the fish with a strong thin well muscled arm, his hands clean. He takes the fish and he throws it on the ground, away from the river. The fish starts to thrash around without getting water and oxygen in its gills and starts to die, slowly dying away, its thrashes and seizures receeding as life seeps away from it. The monk closes his eyes, tears spilling down his face onto his brown robes and then, eyes opened, he grabs the fish and starts making his way back to the hut. I look at his back, and make no move to follow. I cannot go there anymore, it is not for me as feelings of disgust, of confusion rise into me. Why kill a fish? Why not eat a few berries, a few nuts, perhaps an egg, but the fish is much more nutritious and even monks follow darwin, follow the law of survival of the fittest. I turn away from the meditation hut and go onward, isolation in the fibres of my beings, heading into the forest with only my brown robe around me. I enter the trail, with its twigs and its fallen acorns and its fallen green leaves. The canopy of the forest gives shade inside the trail but I go onward anyways, my feet getting scratched by the twigs, by the soil of the mud, by the roots that grow from below ground, rising thickly above and go below again. But I walk despite the pain, focusing instead on the feeling of my bald head, where the wind carresses it. I feel the robes agaisnt my skin, soft and smooth and comfortable, giving warmth in cold and coolness in warmth. I feel my eyes taking in the beauty of the forest, of the trees of the bushes, of the berries and fruits. I see a snake lying in wait underneath a bush, its scales black with green horizontal stripes every ten centimeters along its body. I watch the snake, watch its coils, and its flickering tongue and its slitted eyes examining me, taking stock of me. It uncoils itself from beneath the bush and slithers to me, over the damp mud, and only half a meter away from me it raises its head and hisses to me. I hiss back and we speak, we talk. I tell it of my time with the monk, living in his hut where he teaches me by living, by eating, by drinking tea, by hunting, by fishing, by scavenging for berries. I live with him and then I go to the forest, to make my own way. The snake tells of his home in the tunnels, of how he was the strongest and the best, and how he left his adder nest to make his own way into the world, and how he grew even bigger and stronger hunting mice, hunting injured crows and owls. Now it is a very big adder, at least two meters long, and two hands thick. He travels with me.

"What is your name, Speaker?"

"Salazar Slytherin," I reply to my first friend. "I am going to Hogwarts."

* * *

There is a snake on the grass, rolling through the green blades with fluid movement. She is black scaled, covered in white stripes, and her whole body is at least two meters long, three hands in diameter. She is a large snake, a queen, a predator. She hisses, her forked red tongue flickering out, where fangs protrude, where her gaping maw is the last home of her prey. There is a tree rising above the grass, into the darkness of the sky, where only the stars show a little bit of light. There are thousands of stars stretching endlessly through the inky black space, their colours ranging from white to red to yellow to blues and purples and their numbers so vast and numerous, arranged in a liquidy formation of constant patterns and motions. The snake looks up to the stars, and moves her body up the tree, curling around it to propel herself higher and higher, her gaze - her eyes milky white - on the stars with hisses of wonder and amazement on her tongue. She slithers past the branches, through the web of leaves and spider webs. There is a particular spider sitting motionless in the center of the web, the silky threads pure white. She is covered in a black fur and her jaws show her fangs just like the snake she is deadly venemous. The snake looks at the spider and they gaze at each other, still as rocks and deadly as swords. Then the snake moves, her black scaled body striking, her white stripes breaking through the web as she snaps down on the spider in a fluid movement, as if she is a river of water flowing downward to the sea and she does what is natural, she kills. The spider is no more. Dead in the acid that corrodes her body, dead in the gaping maw of the snake. The snake opens her jaw to the full extent in triumph over being the sole victor, the sole predator of the land. The mouth is at least as fat as her body, in diameter ranging about three hands with her fangs as large as an index finger. Then after closing her mouth - clamping it shut without a noise, pulling her fangs back in her gums before it closes, she moves furhter, higher, toward the gently twinkling sky, rising as sky scrapers rise ten miles away in the night of the city. The twinkling lights of buildings, shops, headlights of cars fill the night sky turning it almost as bright as day. There is a particular dog who looks at the lights with the same wonder as the snake, the human made lights. The dog is muscular, young and strong, a black labrador. His sleek black fur shine in the moonlight that streams past a veritable forest of clouds. His black eyes gaze at the humans walking past him. A man dressed in a silver suit, holding an umbrella over his head to protect him from the dripping rain, passes the dog and puts a hand out to pet the dog but the dog snaps his mouth toward the man's hand. The man quickly pulls his hand back and looks fearful, his blue eyes flashing in caution and he walks away from the dog with fast lighnint quick steps. The shoes that hit the pavement make thunk thunk sounds over the rain drops, and his umbrella held high over his head forms a roof of plastic. The handle bar on the umbrella is curved and wooden, and he holds it tightly, his knuckles white from the pressure he exerts on the handle. In his othere hand he holds a brown brief case, with reddish number locks two on either side of the handle of the brief case. It is closed. BUt then it opens and money falls. Green rectangular strips of paper flow outward with the wind and all the money simply vanishes in the street, in the city, moving with the gust of wind. The man cries out, shouts and screams and tries to chase after the money but there is nothing left, save for a small bill, a mere dollar. He gazes down at the resting bill, tears forming on his eyes, running down his face along with the rian. The umbrella lies two meters away from him, forgotten, as he stares down at the open brief case lying on the muddy ground. He takes the dollar and looks up, noticing a sign with neon green letters glowing: cafe. He enters the coffee shop and sees red wooden walls and about six or seven round tables with comfortable looking arm chairs of black and green leather, three to a table. The table's diameter is at least two meters. At the front of the coffee shop there is a glass counter along with a fat burly man wearing a white apron, jeans, and thick black framed glasses. He looks up, staring, his mouth open, his red lips making an O. And he waves the man over toward him, his hand glinting with a silver ring, there is a snake on an embedded sqaure of the ring, etched out in gold, and the snake is of the same type as the one stretching toward the night sky, the same feel, the same conviction. The man's green eyes are sperpent like slits and glint in the darkness of the shop. The man walks toward him, bowed head showing his sadness and he gets a hot cup of coffee in a black mug. He nurses it with both hands and gingerly takes it to his table, sitting down, his black coat hanging over his suit. It is good quality material, with silver lining. He sips the coffee slowly, and looks out the window at the back of the shop, where a garden stretches onward, with rows of flowers of all varieties, covered in a gigantic glass box. Through the roof of the box, through the window beside the counter, where the man is wiping the glass counter with a white rag, he sees the night sky and his spirit soars, he raises a hand stretching toward the stars and the man at the counter looks at him, leaps up on the counter making cracks in the glass, and runs toward the man. The bartender puts two fatty hands around the man's neck and squeezes, and as terror fills the man in the same vein happiness fills the dog as he chases a butterfly in the meadow, sunshine flowing down from the sky, the darkness and the rain dispelled to give a bright blue sky, fresh air and scents from all over the world. He takes in a deep gust of air, and barks happily, his jaws wide open in a smile, guffawing and laughing inside at the sheer joy of existence as he runs through the grass, chasing the butterfly. Then he comes across a tree, a gnarled and twisted tree. He smells death in the air. He smells danger, fear, snakes and reptilllian scents that seem to hang, heavy and dank. He backs away, whimpering, watching the tree as a fat black snake with white strips slithers down, her gaze locked on the dog. The dog turns, his black fur shining in the sunlight, glistening with a bit of water and some green stains from when he was rolling happily in the grass, and then he runs, faster and faster, but he hears the slither of the snake through the grass but he dares not look back, flowing through the air as if he were flying, running as hard as he is able.

The snake leaps and her gaping jaw strikes. She misses. The dog runs away, escapes, just liek the night sky escaped her.

* * *

Fire roared and crackled through the twigs and the dried leaves lying on the ground, snake movements swimming through, burning black the yellow leaves and the brown twisted twigs thick as fingers. The orange red flames eats at the wood, licking away at the base of the trunk of trees twenty meters to hundred meters high, towering in the sky with leafy canopies, branches flourishing with green and yellow leaves that give shade to what lies below. The fire eats and roars, and spreads in all directions, diffusing through wherever the fuel lies, until soon the whole forest is ablaze. There is orange fire everywhere and birds squacking shouting, deers running through and hooting owls flying up above, while a black bear as huge as three men tumbles to the ground, its fur being singed by the surrounding fire, its big black eyes wide in fear and sorrow as it stares past a wall of flame at her child, cub, a small bear, with a bit of fat layered on his face and brown and black fur on his body, paws with fully grown nails or claws yelling away joining in the cacophony of the sounds of wildlife that run away from the heat of the flames, from the signals of dnager from the scents of utter terror, from the smell of the carbon dioxide and the smoke that tears up at the animals' lungs. They run away from the forest as it burns to the ground, leaving ashes where there once was a home, ashes black and gray that spread like wings into the wind, beyond the sky until there is nothing left but a dry wasted wretched land, a black tint the only sign of the forest flame. There is a waterfall three miles away. It is about fifteen meters in diameter, and it stretches from a river that goes to the ocean. The water is crystal blue, clear and sometimes green with floating dead algea and see wead. There are fishes - red blue orange green - that come from the oceans and the waves and the salty waters so deep and suffocating. They come, they fall, hitting sharp jagged rocks that lie at the base of the watefall. The rocks are obsidian tombstones, with red tints on the rough and sharp edges that clue in to the death by rock the fish the crab suffers. The crabs line up beyond the waterfall, at the base where there the river continues. They are red shelled, soemtimes a dull pink, sometimes the color of yellow pink - beige, and they have edges markings drawings etched in spirals on the shells. They chatter and quiver and hunt, their bulbous eyes on stalks protruding out of the shells, their feet clawed and their eyes mercilessly icy. They run on the wet land, where grass tenatively grows, where beyond the grass, three meters into the land a tall oak tree rises from the earth into the sky, giving a veritable haven of shade over an ecliptical shape over the river that waves and runs through the ground, the mud, the earth. The river carries life, plants and fish which attract birds - white gulls and brown eagles to hunt them - and the birds attract the deer who have come singed and tired from the burning forest. The deer have brown fur and antlers thick, eyes brown, alert, hooves black and four legs well muscled, tinewed flesh running through the lands that surround the river. There is another oak tree growing from the first, not as tall, not as old, about a hundred meters diagnoally left from the first, going even past the waterfall, even further into the earth where the river ends and a lake begins. The lake is calm, its waters still, and a lone salmon with pink scales swims in the water, its mouth open and hunting its preys. There are rolling clouds of white, blue and grey overhead, swirlign lazily with the wind, and beyond the clouds where they part there is an endless blue sky, only with an orange ball shining brilliantly from far away, its light bright, its heat palpitable in the hot summer day. The world sings and the fires that were spreading have stopped. Nature. Flowing rivers and wide empty lands with a few trees, bushes, areas of growing grass.

Lazy clouds always watching.

* * *

I see a brown bear sitting on the meadow grass, facing away from a large river that flows with roaring strength, he sits and he watches the meadow, the shining grass, the sunlight streaming from silver clouds, and he watches the sky. In his paw he holds a jar of golden liquid - honey, and he unlatches the cap of the jar with his paws in a smooth fluid motion, taking in a large dallop of the liquid and putting it in his mouth, opening his jaw revealing rows of pearly white teeth and his eyes twinkling happily, their blue colour the same as the sky - what can be seen of it through the clouds. The clouds thicken and rain starts to pour on the meadow, on the shade filled grass and river where the cloud of darkness seems to hang on the bear. But the bear is oblivious to the rian, eating his honey with his paws, licking at his fists and enjoying the silent blissful pleasures of the early morning. WHen he has finished his jar, his paws still sticky with honey, he turns to the river and ventures toward it cautiously, dipping his paw into the icy water, smelling salt and the palpatable scent of honey on his maw, as well as the scents of flowers filling his nostrils. He wades into the river, diving headfirst in it, and he is washing himself of the honey, because he has eaten his fill of the sugary treat, he oepns his mouth toward the flowing river and lets the water pour onto his teeth, washing his tongue and gums with the flowing water. He then swims underwater, holding his breath until he catches sight of a fish, of a large fish the size of my arm swimming through the river, its scales all manners of colours rainbow like and shining brilliantly in the darkness of hte underwater river where seweed and alrgea lie on the bottom, where the bear touches his feet and his paws, swimming so silently ghost like under the fish and then pounces upward, grabbing the fish in his claws, severing his sharp white boned claws through the fish's body where blood flows from the five wounds, into the river. The bear clutches his prize against his chest as he propels hismelf out of the river onto the surface with his legs. The rain drops hit the flowing water, making ripples all around him and some drops smack his head plafully but he doesnt care that much with a big smile he pushes himself toward the shore, where teh grass grows the most, at least knee high and he watches the flowing river as he takes a bit of his fish, eating and munching on his prey, upon his hunt.

* * *

I see a bright orange light in a blank dark abyss that stretches endlessly. The orange light is circular in shape, like a shpere and grows rapidly, filling up the universe in a bright orange spectrum of textures, tones, and hues, and feelings from varius temperatures to varius pressures. I move through the orange space, experiencing all the sensory perceptions that can be experienced in an abysss and closing my eyes I teleport myself to a planet far away where the ground is muddy river like. I am sinking into the ground. I open my eyes and look down at the marsh land, at the grass tuffets that grow around my feet, and sinking slowly I look at the sky where teh clouds roll endlessly in purple colours and whhere rain falls into rivers and muds. There is a city. Cars roll down grey asphalt roads, their wheels all varieties of shapes inside the spokes where the centers are, some square, others pentagrams. All the tires are black with fibres as thin as hairs and as numerous as the sand grains on a beach on the surface of the rubber material as they roll, as they flatten on the road and then blow up again when the pressure on the area of friction has receeded. I see trees rising from the mud, their branches zig zagging upwards, their leaves protruding outward like mushrooms on the branches, but the tree itself as a whole is like a vertical arrow, thick and wide at the base, and narrowing as it moves upward. The leaves are orange and red, and their textures are rough, as if little granules like sand grains are embedded in the substratem fibres that make up the leaves. The bright colours of the leaves match with the strong sharp scent of the tree, which is like a sweet and sour mixture that is a cross between the scent of lemons and rosemary. A lemon is in my hand. I feel the skin of the lemon, and rub the fruit with the pads of my index finger and my thumb, feeling its roughnes, its smoothness, its softness and hardness. I look at the skin of the lemon, the bright yellow fruit lying on the palm of my hand and I take the lemon and bite into it, letting my white teeth sink into the lemon, letting juice squirt and run into my mouth, onto my tongue, feeling its sourness tingle my sensory taste buds, feeling its juice run down my throat, cooling the thirsty sensation that is lying at the base of my throat above my collar bones. I throw the lemon, my arm a motion of throwing like that of a baseball player. I feel myself lying on the grass, the softness of the ground is like a bed, and the blades of the grass tickle my bare skin. I am utterly naked, lying on the field looking at the sky, at the lcouds. One of the clouds is a puffy oblong shape, and seems very thick and beautiful. It is fluffy looking, grey and blue like the hanging atmosphere of the sky, but it floats very slowly, molding itself into a new shape, somewhat more circular and less of an oval. I see a face, looking down at me from the clouds as the cloud itself morphs into this face with a beard, a long beard, and twinkling dark eyes as well as wide gargantuan features like rigid eyebrows stretching upward diagnolly and the sun streaming through between the eyes in the middle of the forhead. The cloud dissapitates leaving nothing buta bright blue sky with not a single floating water gas in the air just pure empty blue space. The cars front are roundish, and the bakc is liek a triangle. The color of the metal is a mercuric silver like the mercury balls inside a test tube, small and round and glinting with the light of the bulb on the ceiling, shining in a cupboard withspider webs at the hinges of the door. I am sitting on a bench, holding the test tube glass in my hand and then looking down at the mercury balls I throw it against the door and hear the glass shatter, watch the peices fall to the floor, hear the rolling balls of mercury approach my feet, feel the liquid solid soft metal touch the tips of my toes and then I shrink down into the form of a spider and sneak through the crack of the door, into a bright white room with a lot of space, and since I am so small all the furniture looks really large. There is a plush pinkish beige sofa lying on the right of me with flowery patterns like roses and grass and trees and nature pictures on the walls like waterfalls and misty mountains. The front of the wall is a murial painted in dark colours, showign a forest of darkness with mist coiling up at the base of bushes and trees, like snakes and there is a large creature like a fox or a lion with shining green eyes and a lightning bolt scar on the black fur of the creature, looking upward, coiled and read to spring from the wall and onto my spider like body. I see figures math figures like proportionality signs and infinity symbols float through the air, float on parchment where a man sits on a corner next to a fireplace, the window next to him showing the falling snow and the blowing windstorm of cold winter, and the fire roars, giving warmth, as the man writes with a quill sitting on a gigantic brown table, leaning back at hhis armchair .This man is eninstien, and he is not old yet but young, forty or so, his mustache still black, with only a tiny hint of grey. Curled in his motuh is a pipe, it is about as long as an index finger and the bowl of the pipe is filled with lit tobacco, strawberry scents mixing in the air with the smoke as he takes a lungful, puffs and blows. Writing with pen and paper, pen ink on the paper looking down at it there are no mat hfigures but only dooodllles of cars and clouds and trees and floating red stains as he leaks blood from a test tube. Cows blood leaking. What in the world is going on in the room in the winter storm as the man the genius leaks from pen and blood and seeks and speaks through a voice not his own but gnarled sounding deeper than ah uman voice box as if it is an animal roaring with a mans tongue speaking like a drugged alcoholic mumbling tumbling down a dark alley, a bottle in one hand, tattered coat on his body, torn and brown and old, eyes puffy and bloodshot and mouth once curled in mocking sarcastic laughter and jokes now a half smile, now an idiot man drunk with alcohol iin the bottle. The neck of thhe bottle is about as big as the edge of a pencil but it widens outward at the lips looking for all appearances like a time sand device where sand rolls down with graviity into the bottom funnel collecting wasted moments of lifes treasures into the bottom for fuel to burn and it burns in a black misty flame that stretches upward through the chimney of a house, the grey rectangular bricks of cement and red bricks making up the chimney slowly falling apart crumbling like powder like a sugar cube under the pressure of the atmosphere.


End file.
